


if i get burned

by EllieCarina



Category: Cursed (TV 2020)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Gen, Post Season 1, Pym is not a fan, Side Story, has mentions of Arthur/Nimue, pymcelot, speculative first half of season 2, squirrel loves his new dad, sweet sweet redemption, will have a dash of faking relationship and oh no only one bed, will have some Arthur/Guinevere
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:07:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25735525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieCarina/pseuds/EllieCarina
Summary: The monk extends his neck under visible strain but when he sees the boy, he relaxes, lowering his head again and breathing heavy. He’s looking up, not at her when he speaks next.“Who are you?” His voice is brittle, softer than she expected but all the more eerie for it.“None of your business,” Pym replies. Usually she wouldn’t be so brave but he’s so frail she could probably kill him in this state if she tried, which makes her a little bolder.He sniffs. “You’re fae.” His fingers flex, brushing up against a flaky coat of dried ointment on the side of his thigh. “You tended to my wounds.”Pym says nothing.“Thank you,” he mutters. Pym feels the rocky cave wall dig into her back as she recoils from his gratitude.“I didn’t do it for you,” she bites. “I did it because Squirrel asked.”He breathes out a long breath and closes his eyes. “Good, then you can take him.”“What?”****In saving a sworn enemy, Pym has potentially chosen a path that holds way more than she bargained for.**set after the season 1 finale**
Relationships: Pym/The Weeping Monk | Lancelot (Cursed)
Comments: 33
Kudos: 198





	1. the cave

**Author's Note:**

> So... let's see how this goes, shall we?

The byzantine ships turned around after floating another day closeby, watching the fae and the raiders clearing Beggar’s Coast of corpses, separating dead northern brother from dead northern brother and manblood from fae. Some of the living left to complete the grim task had yelled frantically or started weeping when they saw the ships setting sail, but Pym remained unmoved. She knew better and she wasn’t surprised.

Word had reached them just as word must have reached the captains of those byzantine ships: Father Carden had died, assumed to have been killed by Nimue. The Church had taken their Red Paladines out of the siege camp and back into Gramaire, King Uther had himself retreated and recanted his vow of protection for the fae, seeing as apparently there was no longer a Sword of Power that had bargained for it.

Which made sense when you knew —like only few of the wary, tired souls hiding out near the coves and caves of Beggar’s Coast did— that the sword’s wielder was most likely dead. It was Morgana and Merlin that had come to relay the news just a few hours before, arriving by lightning in a whirl of mist and thunder. Now, the sword they’d brought with them but Nimue was lost without a trace.

Pym’s best friend had fallen down a waterfall into the Dark Lake, pierced by arrows, likely killed by a small girl Morgana knew for the convent, a wee thing that went insane and burned the monastery down over her hatred for the fae. The whole story didn’t make much sense to Pym but she couldn’t find it within herself to care about the specifics of it. Nothing about the _why_ changed the _how_ it turned out. With Nimue gone and probably dead. 

Arthur, of course, was livid. Even more so when he learned that Gawain had been murdered by the Paladines and Squirrel remained missing. Still, his priority was Nimue and it had taken an hour of Morgana and Merlin being back for a plan to look for Nimue and a search party being formed. Or better, two search parties. Which had been Pym’s idea. You cover more ground that way. Also at the spot where Nimue went into the water, the river forks, going into two different directions. It would be foolish not to account for that. 

So as the Red Spear commands for her small fleet to take in the few fae still remaining on the shore, she joins Arthur on his team. Pym is relegated to Merlin and the Sword as the designated healer. A spot that Morgana, now dressed in all black for some reason, fills for her brother. Kaze is the warrior for team Merlin and Pym is glad for it. The Red Spear is a fierce warrior and beneath all her bravado and posturing she has a kind heart, but damn if she isn’t a piece of work. 

Kaze is equally as strong, nimble and good at killing enemies but she’s far nicer. That kind of helps having to go with Merlin. Pym supposes he has done some things right and maybe the complete disregard of his character should be re-evaluated but it’s still _Merlin._ And every fae child knows that he betrayed his kind. 

Once they—along with a set of ten fighters each— have set out on their path to the Dark Lake, Pym walks beside Merlin, despite herself drawn to his grief about losing Nimue which she feels comes close enough to her own to give them some common ground to build on. Still, she has questions.

“Are you doing this to help the fae or just Nimue?” She asks him, keeping step. He walks briskly and he barely even acknowledges her question. “Look, it’s fine either way, I just want to know who I’m fighting with.”

“You’re not going to be be fighting, child,” he says. Pym gives him a look. Yeah, so technically he’s right and she isn’t a fighter and really _shouldn’t_ fight but something about his dismissal rubs her the wrong way.

“I could if I had to,” she says. “I’ve held an axe.”

Merlin huffs and it sounds like it surprised himself as much as it does Pym. She looks up and catches the moment he reigns in his smile.

“I can see why you’re so important to her,” Merlin acknowledges. “You shine bright, young Pym.”

“Thank you?” Pym isn’t sure she even wants this compliment. “So are you gonna answer my question?”

“I’m doing it for my daughter,” he answers, point blank. “But I have never been an enemy to my kind. I did what I did for the fae where I was, as best as I could.”

“Well, your ‘best’ wasn’t all that great then, was it?” Pym blurts out and only catches herself once the accusation is out there. She closes her mouth and draws in a breath, afraid of Merlin yelling at her at the insolence but at the same time she isn’t ready to walk back on her statement because... look at where they are!

“I suppose it wasn’t,” the magician admits, instead of getting angry, but a brief glance up at him tells Pym it’s time to drop the issue. 

So they keep walking next to each other in silence the rest of the way until they’re at the lake.

They don’t wait to scour the waters. Arthur is the first one in and the last one out. Merlin conjures up spells to help but it’s no use. Nimue is nowhere to be found.

“She’ll have drifted down either river,” Morgana says, looking grim but determined. “Let’s split up and not wait till morning. We can cover a good amount of leagues until nightfall. But be on the lookout for Paladins. Merlin and I… we can communicate, so we will stay in constant contact.” 

She takes a moment, looks around, sees her brother, and puts her hand on his tensed arm. “We will find her,” she promises and then casts her eye at the group, nodding once with severity. It’s their go sign. The groups split and Pym is back on her way, walking silently beside Kaze this time, staring at the river as hard as she can but not finding any clues or anything out of the ordinary. It’s just a stupid riverbend that looks the same everywhere they go.

Gladly there are no Red Paladines either and when night falls, they make camp in the woods on the edge of a clearing. There are hot springs nearby that are both perfect for a much needed bath and clothes wash but which also disguise the smoke of their fires. For the first time in days, Pym gets a hot meal. For the first time in days, she doesn’t fall asleep smelling herself, reeking of blood and filth. Yet, she still wakes up after a horrible dream of Dof dangling down a cliff and her trying to save him but being unable to. When she opens her eyes, she starts, disoriented, clutching the amulet he gave her before he died, it’s intricate edges pushing into the flesh of her palms. 

Merlin looks at her, stoically as ever. He’s stopped drinking which makes him even more severe. 

“Sorry, bad dream,” she feels compelled to whisper in apology. His features soften.

“Those happen when you’ve seen enough horrors,” he says, his eyes catching on her necklace. “That’s powerful magic you got there.”

“What?” Pym looks down at the keepsake. Dof said it kept him safe in battle but Pym had taken that to be more of an old fishwife’s tale. “Really?”

“Not from around here,” Merlin nods. “This is older, from the winter lands, the Ice Gods. It protects its wearer, heals wounds you can and can’t see and makes you move faster, away from danger. They’re very rare, you should hold onto it.”

“It heals wounds?” Pym sits up straighter. “That’s not true, Dof was— my friend was wearing it when he died and it didn’t heal anything.”

“Not like this it won’t,” Merlin says. “You’d have to melt it down.”

“Now you tell me,” she whispers, devastated. If she had only known. She could have saved Dof!

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Merlin says quietly. “But now there’s a chance you could still save someone else.”

They share a moment, looking out at the mist emerging from the hot springs close by, dancing into everchanging swirls, calm and undisturbed by the insane world around them.

“Do you think it could help Nimue?” Pym asks.

“If she’s still alive somewhere, maybe.”

“Do you think she is?”

“It doesn’t feel like she’s gone,” the magician reveals. “I feel like I would know if she was. But then again, maybe I’m just an old fool wishful thinking.”

They both sigh and then Pym tries to go back to sleep. 

Their search party walks down the river in increments for another long day, looking for Nimue in the riverbed and hiding from faraway noises. They’re getting closer to where the siege camp stood and by the sounds of it, the camp is in its final stages of being torn down. Whatever King’s and Church’s next steps are, they’re going to be made soon. Pym is uneasy but she tries not to show it. She’s being strong. For Nimue, for Dof, for Gawaine, her parents, everyone they lost. 

She thinks about Squirrel a lot. Wondering if he’s just another dead child in a ditch somewhere, wondering if he’s lost somewhere all alone. Wondering if someone cares for him. Nimue would be so angry if she knew he was missing again. She’s staring into the flames of their campfire as Merlin conceals the smoke in a thick fog he conjured up in the stretch of wood they decided to settle down in for the night. Kaze snores behind her, the ten viking and fae warriors snore too but can’t match her for sheer volume. That thought makes Pym smile.

“She’s a fierce one,” Merlin notes, watching Pym look over at Kaze. “Skilled. Reminds me of me when I was younger.” Pym eyes him, Nimue has told her about what Merlin did when he was a warrior. Judging by the change on his face, he realises this. 

“I was blinded by desire for revenge and I believed that my actions were justified,” Merlin addresses the unspoken question, Pym listens. “The romans were our enemy, threatening our way of life. They wanted us gone, just like the Church does now. We thought a brief cruelty to rid ourselves of our opposition once and for all was the right thing to do. We thought that, if they were decimated enough for their hatred of us to die out, we could build a better world, where fae and mankind could live in peace. Turns out you don’t win a people’s favour by killing.”

“And that was somehow surprising?” Pym challenges. “You killed innocents!”

“They weren’t innocent in my eyes,” he says, calmly and Pym has to chew on that for a while.

“But they were,” she says eventually, sounding damn near like a spiteful child. “Just like we are now.”

“Maybe,” Merlin allows. “But looking at the world like that gets no men on the battlefield. There would be no wars if we all thought of each other as innocents.”

“Maybe we should, then!” Pym leans forward, a burst of animation making her hushed voice break into something louder.

“I did, after Rome. I tried my hardest to not see hatred but innocence in humans. Making them my allies and trying to bridge the gap between our peoples is how I’ve come to be known as an enemy to the fae, a traitor,” Merlin deadpans. “You see, you can’t win, child.”

Once again, Pym is trapped in a logic that seems too advanced for her life experience. It clashes and resonates at once with everything she knows to be true in the world.

“I shall rest now,” Merlin declares. “Another long day ahead of us tomorrow. You’ll keep watch, healer?”

Pym nods, not like she could sleep now anyway. 

She studies the flames and examines the ways of men and fae, wonders if she would be capable of hurting innocents, if she believed them to be evil. To her shame, she can’t say with absolute integrity that she wouldn’t be. Had she been born different, in different circumstances to different parents, she might have been that convent girl that shot Nimue. She can’t say, that’s the worst part. 

The fire slowly glimmers out and Pym lets it. The night is warm enough and nearly over, her companions won’t suffer from a chill. Soon it will be morning. She casts her eyes to the sky turning a softer shade of blue in the distance when something closer catches her attention. There’s a sound, a twig breaking under a heal. She perks up. Considers rousing Kaze but then again it’s probably nothing, so why make a fuss?

Deciding to be brave, she gets up to investigate and takes a small dagger from her bag. She moves slowly, trying to not make a sound, into the tree line. The noises come from further into the forest. Pym walks. Then it rustles somewhere behind her. She spins around. No, not behind—above! She looks up in time to see the form fly towards her, she drops the dagger out of sheer surprise. She squeaks but makes no sound, something is covering her mouth. Panic and adrenaline hit at the same time that she understands that something a lot smaller than her has wrapped itself around her and in the next moment she sees blue piercing eyes and realises that she knows them.

“Shhh,” Squirrel says, holding himself up on her shoulders and back like a little monkey, covering her mouth. “Don’t scream, it’s me!”

Still reacting to her panic, she shakes him off of her, making him drop down onto the forest floor to recover quickly.

“You!” She hisses. “Gods, you scared me to death.” It takes another short moment to understand what just happened and who is standing before her. Once she does, she falls to her knees and brings the child close for a tight embrace. “Squirrel, I’m so glad you’re alive. Come with me, we have a camp set up, you’re safe now!”

“No,” Squirrel says and struggles free from her. “I know you’re with them but they can’t come. I need you. Just you. I need you to help someone.”

“What?”, Pym stays low, to be on his level and try to make sense of what the boy is saying. “What do you mean, help who?”

“Please, there’s no time,” Squirrel begs, adamant and urgent, like it’s life or death. “Please, come with me.”

“I can’t just leave in the middle of the night, they’ll wonder where I am,” she argues.

“Then leave them a note,” Squirrel says, impatient. “And bring your healer stuff.”

Pym rises and looks down at him, irritated, of two minds about helping him or dragging him back kicking and screaming to the others. The pleading, desperate look on his face makes the decision for her. 

Pym takes a portion of each of her healer’s powders and tinctures, making sure to leave Merlin, Kaze and the others with enough to dress their own healing battle wounds and places a note next to Merlin, saying that she had to meet someone and is going to catch up with them further down the river. Back in the forest, Squirrel immediately takes her hands and drags her further and further in until she has lost all sense or orientation, even as the sun rises around them. 

“Why are you doing this, why didn’t you let me wake the others?” she asks, once the sun has crept fully from the horizon and they’ve walked for a good hour through dense woods.

“You’ll know when we get there,” the child says ominously and Pym keeps walking after him, because what choice does she have.

After another trek down the side of a rocky incline, Squirrel is suddenly gone and Pym panics before his little head sticks out of the rocks in front of her. She realises that he ducked into a cave but he doesn’t leave her time to process this. Instead he yanks her by the arm, says: “Come on” and pulls her into a pitch black cave. Squirrel leads sure-footed, which is a good thing because Pym can’t see anything. Yet, as soon as her eyes have adjusted to the sparse light and she can make out her surroundings, she wishes they hadn’t. Because there, on a pile of black fabric lies a man she could pick out even in the darkest of nights.


	2. the lost one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So given that the monk has said fairly little in the series, I've taken some liberties with his character... I made him a little sassy, which I think there is arguably grounds for in the show but it remains to be seen if it's somewhat accurate or terribly OOC. All I know is I like my misguided homicidal sad bois with a bit of a sarcastic streak :D

“What is he doing here?” Pym takes a frightened step back eventhough the figure is clearly out of commission. One would think he was dead if his plagued, rattled breathing wasn't so loud. “Do you know who this is, Squirrel?”

“Yes, I do,” the boy says and puts himself in between them. “That’s why I didn’t want the others to know. Please, you need to help him!”

“What? Why?”

“Please, Pym,” Squirrel begs. “He saved me, he saved my life from the Paladines. He took me away from the camp, he nearly died. And he’s not getting better. I don’t know what to do, he—”

“Slow down,” Pym pleads, trying to keep up. “He saved you?”

Squirrel nods. “They'd have killed me if it wasn’t for him,” he declares, putting as much weight on his words as a ten-year-old can. “I owe him my life. So we have to save him.”

“He’s a bad man, Squirrel,” Pym says carefully. “He did terrible things.”

“He didn’t understand,” Squirrel insists. “The father, the one who led the Red Paladines, he told him all kinds of lies. About who we are, about who he is. Wait!”

With that, Squirrel drops to the stony ground and labours to collect some dusty rocks and crumbling leafs. With a fistfull of the stuff, he moves on his knees to the unconscious man. He takes his hand and puts the dirt on the man’s palm, waiting to gauge her reaction to what unfolds.

Pym gasps as she sees the monk's skin change colour. Even in the dimly lit cave, she immediately knows what he is and then she looks up at his unmoving face, sees the markings on his face for what they really are and staggers a few paces backwards.

“Ashfolk. But how?” She mutters. “He’s one of us?! How could he…”

“I told you,” Squirrel says vehemently, jumping to his feet. “Please, help him, he’ll die!”

Begrudgingly, and only for Squirrel, Pym complies, but not before finding the monk’s armour and throwing it against the far wall.

When she gets close, it’s hard not to recoil. The first time she touches the man’s skin, she half expects it to sear her flesh away. It doesn’t, it’s just skin—but it’s still hot to the touch because he’s burning up. The boy is right, like this, the monk will not get better. From what she can tell he has a myriad of open wounds and probably more than one of them are infected. He won’t survive the day with that fever. Or rather, he won’t survive the next couple of hours. Pym tries to steady herself. This is the state Dof was in at the end and she hadn’t been able to help him. Then again, they had been trapped in Gramaire and Pym had had no access to the fresh ingredients for her remedies. 

As if lead by other forces, she goes ahead with it, leaving Squirrel in charge of cutting the monk out of his robes while she goes to fetch fresh water from a nearby spring and collect some herbs. All of this she nearly drops when she returns, her eyes now much quicker to accommodate the darkness, also because Squirrel has lit a small fire. That’s not what shocks Pym though. 

It’s the fact that the monk lies there naked as the first day on his torn and cut up clothes.

“Oh dear,” Pym says and barely catches the wooden bowl of water in her shaky grasp, looking away. “Cover him up, Squirrel. That’s… private parts.”

“Oh sorry,” Squirrel says, like the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind and maybe it hadn’t. “You just said to undress him, so…” 

“Yes, yes, you did good, just... ,” Pym stammers. “From what I’ve seen his… groin area is… fine. In terms of, er, wounds and such, so. Have you fixed it?”

“Mhm-mhm,” Squirrel says and Pym turns again, finding the offending area covered with a black rag and reluctantly approaches the body again.

She makes the quickest quick work of putting her remedies together. After she has prepared two tinctures, she hands over third bowl to Squirrel to stir as she goes on to apply the first. She puts it on the most inflamed of wounds that look relatively clean still. Those that don’t look clean, she first dabs with a strong spirit she brought and then lathers with a disinfecting mixture of chamomile, eucalyptus and hyssop. The man doesn’t wake but he stirs and moans then, pained. So at least he’s not all the way gone yet.

Once this is done to the wounds she can reach, all she can do next is wait for it to settle and sink in before she asks Squirrel to help turn the monk on his side so she can access his back. And when he does, she loses her breath for a moment, seeing the mural of fresh lashes upon old scars covering his skin from his tail bone to his shoulder blades.

“He did this to himself,” she mutters, recognising the sight from those weird old men in the harbour that used to lash themselves in public to repent for imagined or not-imagined crimes. The thought that this particular creature sought to punish himself relentlessly for his crimes at least, gives her at once a sense of sick pleasure and helpless sympathy. He’s all the way broken, not just skin-deep. No, this goes further. 

Once the man's back has gotten the same treatment, she puts him on his side in a steady position, one that he won’t roll out of until his strength has returned, and then covers him with all the fabric that she can find. 

“But he’s so hot already,” Squirrel argues.

“I know, but it has be like this,” Pym explains. “He’s got a fever and that fever needs to break. If it doesn’t, he won’t make it."

“But what do we do now?” Squirrel asks her, his eyes wet with tears that spring up.

“Nothing,” she tells him. “There’s nothing more we can do. The fever needs to break.”

Squirrel’s way of accepting this is to plop down beside the monk and cuddle in close, trying to make his short child’s arm span the man’s back, offering additional heat. Not that their patient reacts in any way. Pym sinks back against the cave wall and watches them, both worried and in awe. Squirrel cares deeply for this man and she supposes it makes sense. If the monk indeed saved the boy's life and betrayed his brethren, his life’s cause, to do so, it would change things, especially in a child's mind. It makes little sense to her but she can’t refute the sight in front of her. A fierce, brave fae boy is desperate to save a man who is infamous for betraying, for slaying their kind. It seems impossible to fathom, yet here they are.

She looks down at her hands, streaked with dirt, covered in dried blood and remedies for the injuries she attended to and then glances over at the Weeping Monk. After everything, his skin is just skin. His body, bruised and pricked open, is just a body. He is flesh and bone, just like her, and that concept itself feels foreign. He had styled himself a demon but beneath all that, she had just touched nearly every inch of his earthly form. She’s loathe to admit it, or even think it… but looking at him fighting for his life —and watching Squirrel fight for it, too— it’s hard to wish death upon him after all. Even though he deserves it. Conflicted but aware that she’s not going to figure anything more out as it is, she drifts to sleep.

It’s Squirrel who wakes her an undetermined time later. He shakes her violently, his voice high-pitched and urgent. “Pym, wake up! Wake up! He’s shaking!” 

The boy is right. Pym struggles to move, still half-asleep and more stumbles than walks toward the man as he thrashes in the throes of a seizure.

“Put his cloak under his head,” she commands, “careful not to touch him too much. The shaking must stop on its own but we have to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.”

Squirrel follows her instructions and then cuddles into her side, watching as the spasms slowly subside. When it’s done, the monk stills, his mouth falls open and he breathes from what Pym can tell. Carefully, she leans in and touches his forehead, damp with sweat.

“The fever broke,” she realises. “I don’t know why this just happened—but the fever broke.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Squirrel asks.

“It is,” she replies and the boy looks relieved. And so exhausted.

“Did you sleep at all?”

He shakes his head.

“Rest,” Pym tells him. “You need to sleep.”

“I need to watch him,” he insists.

“I’ll watch him,” she promises. He eyes her sceptically. “I will, I promise. Go to sleep, Squirrel.”

The boy doesn’t move.

“ _Percival_ ,” she says because the lad's real name usually does the trick of conveying that one is serious about their requests. He squares his jaw but begrudgingly obeys, rolling into a little ball against the cave wall.

“Don’t hurt him,” he says before closing his eyes and Pym wonders if she should be offended that he thinks that she would. 

As long as it takes, she watches Squirrel fall asleep, then heads out to get more water and fresh herbs to re-apply her pastes and tinctures on the monk’s wounds. It’s fairly mechanical, the healing business in itself. It doesn’t really matter who is under her care, even now. The body is a machine and she has the tools to mend it, however rudimentary or botched together they may be. She’s by no means a great healer but she gets around. It’s easier to tend to this body particularly because it's asleep, easier to treat it as if it was just another put before her to take care of. She tries to cling to that notion as best as she can. For Squirrel.

After a while, the sounds of her patient’s laboured breathing mixes in with the boy's soft snores and Pym touches her hand to the monk’s forehead again. It feels a lot more healthy than it did a few hours ago.

She takes a moment to be proud of herself and how she was able to snatch a person from the clutches of death but that triumph doesn’t last because then he stirs and opens his eyes before she can take her hand away. He blinks groggily, confused, as she jumps away from him. She doesn’t dare to even breathe when he turns his head to see what made the noise. She figures he can’t move any more than this but she is still terrified. 

The monk’s eyes squint, undoubtedly trying to make out her shape. She has to breathe again but tries to do it with as little noise as possible. He cranks his head in her direction anyway but she’s not sure that he even fully sees her before his attention shifts elsewhere. He’s looking around, as animated as he can in his state, looking for something specific. He grows visibly upset by his limited range of motion, huffing and puffing, trying to sit up but falling down again. When he glances back at her, he manages to look at once delirious and sharp, piercing. He rasps, gurgles, tries to get a word out.

“Squirrel,” he breathes. It’s a question.

“He’s just over there,” Pym answers and points at the curled up boy on the other side of the cave, trying to keep her voice steady. “I told him to sleep, he hasn’t slept properly in days, I think.”

The monk extends his neck under visible strain but when he sees the boy, he relaxes, lowering his head again and breathing heavy. He’s looking up, not at her when he speaks next.

“Who are you?” His voice is brittle, softer than she expected but all the more eerie for it.

“None of your business,” Pym replies. Usually she wouldn’t be so brave but he’s so frail she could probably kill him in this state if she tried, which makes her a little bolder.

He sniffs. “You’re fae.” His fingers flex, brushing up against a flaky coat of dried ointment on the side of his thigh. “You tended to my wounds.”

Pym says nothing.

“Thank you,” he mutters. Pym feels the rocky cave wall dig into her back as she recoils from his gratitude.

“I didn’t do it for you,” she bites. “I did it because Squirrel asked.”

He breathes out a long breath and closes his eyes. “Good, then you can take him.”

“What?”

“The boy,” he says after a long moment, like speaking is taking a toll on him, which Pym figures makes sense. “Leave me. Take him to safety. That’s all that… mattered.”

Pym is surprised to find herself agreeing with the monster but something tells her Squirrel would curse her if she whisked him away now. 

“I will,” she says anyway. “But not until he’s rested.”

“Hm,” the man huffs. “Fine.”

A couple of endless moments follow where he labours out his breaths and Pym tries to become one with the mountain they’re stuck in. 

“What’s your name?” The monk asks eventually, so sudden it makes Pym jump. She doesn’t answer and so there’s a heavy silence lingering between them for a long time.

After an eternity, the man rasps out: “My name is Lancelot.”

“Perevida,” Pym says finally, using her actual first name because he doesn’t get to know what her friends call her.

It’s not for him to know what became her nickname from childhood because try as she might have, she could not pronounce her given name any better than “Pymevidah” for the longest time.

But the Weeping Monk, or… _Lancelot,_ doesn’t comment on her name any further or inquire about anything else. He just stares at the cavern roof.

Pym isn’t mad about it but it’s also weird. Everything in her nature calls to fill the empty air with words because _Gods_ , she can’t stand to be with another person and have to suffer through silences. Then again she doesn’t want to talk to him. Would that Squirrel was awake, just to disperse her uneasiness.

The fact that the monk is still nearly completely naked doesn’t help, especially since he seems wholly unbothered by it. She thinks he barely even registered the fact and if that’s true, it makes him somehow more threatening, like not even laying there bare, injured and helpless, makes him afraid. So, as to not give him any ideas to use his lack of fear and attack his healer, she holds her peace and wills herself to stay quiet.  
  


To her credit, she lasts a very long time, sitting in her uncomfortableness forever with nothing to focus on other than the child’s snores. Judging by Squirrel’s unmoving form, he’ll be out for another few hours. Eventually, that prospect gets the better of her, though. And so she starts speaking, mindless, as if her mouth moves on its own.

“You should drink something,” she declares and gets up, her joints cracking from lack of recent use. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move. Don’t touch the boy. Just… don’t move.”

“Don’t have much of a choice, do I?” The monk challenges but it lacks bite. He’s obviously still too weak to even fully raise his head.

He is still in the very same spot when Pym returns with a wooden bowl of spring water. She puts it into his hands, careful not to let their fingers touch and he paces himself at first, trying to lift the bowl to his mouth but he’s parched and also clumsy, so much of the water ends up running down the side of his face anyway.

He growls, displeased and a little bit desperate. Pym reacts on instinct, like a mother, kneeling beside him to help despite herself. She takes the bowl from him and then puts his head on her lap. In doing so, her fingers touch the spot on the back of his head where his hair is shaved and a cross has been etched into the skin. She’s careful not to have any contact with that - as if the symbol itself could burn her. It’s a dastardly reminder of who she is dealing with here and it makes her proceed with caution.

Not that there’s time to linger on that as the monk drinks greedily from the bowl she holds to his lips, less sloppy than before. She has to move with him to match his gulps. He’s grateful, she thinks first. _Helpless,_ she thinks second. She could kill him so easily now.

She wonders how she would do it. A piece of cloth would do just fine if she pressed it right on his mouth once he stops drinking. But then when he does, he looks up at her, fully aware now. Their eyes meet and she can tell he can tell what she’s considering.

“You’re thinking about killing me,” he states. Pym drops the bowl, then his head and then scooches back. 

“No,” she spits, caught. “No, I don’t.”

“You’re a bad liar,” he says and relaxes, watching her. 

He’s gaining strength. She can tell by his demeanour and by the fact that he doesn’t crumble a bit under her appraising gaze either. His blue eyes linger on hers, steely and unrelenting. They’re clearer now than when he first opened them to her. It feels like he sees right through her and that bothers her immensely—but for some reason, she can’t quite look away either. 

There’s a sick kind of fascination to it, to look into the eyes of a murderer, to try and see if there’s a soul left in there. She’d like to come up with a firm 'No' as an answer but in spite of that desire, she can’t help feeling a twisted sense of kinship instead, can’t help acknowledging a spirit behind those eyes. He’s alive. And he’s real.

Maybe her reaction can be chalked up to him being fae? Yes, that’s what it must be. She decides she's just imagining things and squares her jaw. She won’t allow this man to seem harmless or familiar to her _ever._ That would be playing with her life. Her amulet sits heavy on her chest, protecting her, making her brave.

“But I could kill you if I wanted,” she warns him. “You’re helpless after all.”

“Less than you think,” he tells her and considers her for a while. 

Pym stubbornly doesn’t break the eye contact as his stare etches itself into her brain, unflinching, sucking all her secrets out. She stares back anyway. Let him look. It’s not like she’s a well of hidden things in any case. If far from surface deep, Pym has still always worn her heart right on her sleeve, so if the monk is trying to get anything compromising from sifting through her soul by way of his gaze, he won’t find many surprises. But that of course also means that he likely already figured her out because she’s terribly easy to read.

“You’re no murderer,” he finally deems and turns back to look at the roof of the cave as if suddenly bored with her, which prompts Pym to release a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

“You don’t know me,” she argues, even though it would be more sensible to stay quiet… but her heart-on-her-sleeve-ness forbids her. She’s offended by his judgement, his dismissal of her as a threat, so she throws in a glare for good measure, trying to look menacing.

“But I know murderers, and you’re not one, milady,” he says and that’s that. The fact that he called her 'milady' shocks her into a brief silence. 

“Don’t call me that,” she says once she’s got her words back. And then she touches her necklace for the strength she needs and _moves._

Quick as a fox, she closes the distance between them, grabs a piece of the cloak he lies on and brings it up to his face. She covers his nose and mouth with both her hands, pushing down. His eyes grow large, signifying that she did manage to surprise him. She is pleased with herself just as long as it takes for him to grab her wrists with his large hands and she realises that he’s still a hell of a lot stronger than her.

He could pluck her off him easily but he just holds her hands with one of his, removes the rag with the other and then puts her fingers around his throat. Pym stares down at him, her eyes wide.

“Do it then,” he huffs out laboringly and pushes on her digits until she can feel his windpipe strain under her grasp, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “With your own hands. I never expected to survive this anyway.”

He pushes, so she pushes and he locks eyes with her once more, brown and blue, and for a moment, she thinks she might do it. Rid the world of him, punish him!

After all, he deserves death a thousandfold, maybe more than that.

But then she thinks of Squirrel, alive to be asleep next to them because the monk, because _Lancelot,_ saved him. And she thinks of Merlin and what he had done, what he had said about killing innocents. _They weren’t innocent in my eyes,_ he had told her. There hadn’t been innocents in the eyes of the monk either. Those very eyes that are now trained on her, sitting above the markings of the Ashfolk that look like tears. They are watering from his struggle to breathe. And Pym wonders.

Maybe, if she had learned what he had learned, the roles would be reversed right now? After all, who could say?


	3. the storm

_Maybe, if the roles were reversed... who could say?_

That’s the thought that shakes Pym out of it. Because she won’t be like him. She won’t justify the killing of a helpless being at her mercy as a righteous act because that creature wronged her or her kind. She would be no better than him then. So she shakes loose, moves away. They’re both panting then. Him from air returning to his lungs, her from whatever had just transpired between them. 

“Kill me anytime, Perevida,” he rasps and there’s somewhat of an awkward smile playing on his lips. “I won’t stop you.”

“I might still,” she says but it sounds a weak assurance, even to her own ears.

Lancelot breathes what is almost a chuckle. “You could as well. There’s no place left for me in the world. Not with my brothers. Not after what I did.”

“Because you saved Squirrel?” Pym asks. Curious and babbling before she can stop herself.

“It’s more than that,” he says evenly, surprising her by answering at all. “I murdered many of my brothers in the process, turned my back on the cause. On my father. I belong nowhere now.”

“Nowhere is better than with the Paladines,” Pym says adamantly. “They are killing your own kind. How could you join them in the first place?”

“I was taught I was saving their souls. My own kind's,” he says, “from eternal damnation.”

“Well that’s bullshit,” Pym declares. “And really, it makes killing you far too kind. I'm glad I didn't do it now. You’d never learn how wrong you were, how you hurt us! You’d just be _gone._ That’s not justice.” 

Now he really laughs, just once and loud. “You’re kidding yourself if you think that whatever justice awaits me with your kin is anything other than death. So I’d rather you did it here. Quickly, before the boy wakes up. Just say I succumbed to my wounds. It’ll be easy enough to believe.”

“No,” Pym says, certain now that she won’t give him that easy way out, at the exact same time that Squirrel rasps awake and sits up with a yawn.

The sight of the monk awake makes him vivid and quick on his feet, running over to hug the man.

“You’re okay!” He exclaims and visibly knocks the air out of him even if he’s already lying down. The monk coughs when he softly manoeuvres the boy back to his feet, or knees more like. 

Squirrel sits in front of him like a guard dog but when he turns around to Pym, he doesn’t look like he still thinks she’d hurt the man. Instead he beams at her, grateful.

“Thank you,” he says and for a moment everything looks like it’s right in the world for him. But then the monk sits up with a groan and speaks.

“You need to leave,” he says, looking at the boy. “It’s time you got home to your people.”

“Without you?” Squirrel asks, quick on the uptake.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Percival,” Lancelot says, softer than Pym has imagined he could, it makes her uneasy, even more so when she sees that Squirrel doesn’t seem to mind the man using his real name at all. “You must know I can’t come back with you.”

“But why? You saved my life,” the boy argues. “Pym believes it, the others will, too. Right?”

Squirrel looks at Pym, demanding reassurance. The monk looks at her too, a little curious almost and she understands that he just learned what her friends really call her.

“I… I don’t know,” she admits, ignoring the uneasiness she feels at that realisation. “I don’t think it’s that simple. I think he… I think _Lancelot_ is right. He can’t come with us.”

“No,” Squirrel whines immediately. “We can’t leave him.”

“You have to,” Lancelot says, more firm. “Pym,” he says carefully, and she involuntarily shudders at the sound of her name on his lips, “she’ll take you back to your people. I’ll go as far as I can, see that nothing happens to you. But I can’t join you after.”

“No, you can, you can fight for us, I know they’ll let you,” Squirrel urges.

“Squirrel, they’ll kill him,” Pym says. “You don’t know what he did.”

“I know enough,” the boy says. “I’ve seen enough. But…”

“Then you must know,” the monk insists. “There’s no other way. Your people, they won’t forgive me and I don’t blame them.”

Squirrel sits with this for a while, looking like he’s turning it all over in his head. But eventually, his shoulders sag as he comes to understand that they’re right. “This isn’t fair,” he complains.

“Few things in life are,” the monk says matter-of-factly. “We should move soon, it’ll be easier to find our way in the woods. Pym can lead us.”

“We’ll find Merlin, he’ll know where to go.” She nods. “Our people moved to a new hideout. It was too dangerous to stay where we were.”

“Maybe I can talk to Merlin about Lancelot,” Squirrel tries. “Maybe he’ll-”

“Let it go,” the monk says and then more emphatically: “ _Please_.”

Squirrel pouts but he finally stops arguing. Into the following silence, Pym speaks, eager to get this absurd situation behind her. “So are you good to go?” She’s looking at the monk. “Like now?” 

He tilts his head at her, then looks down at himself. Then back at her. “Well. Not quite like this.” 

And Pym thinks that’s fair. He is still very much naked. 

“I think I’ll head out and get more water and some mushrooms for breakfast,” she says, feeling sort of intrusive suddenly. “Come on, Squirrel, let’s give him some privacy.”

Squirrel runs ahead, heedless, while Pym rises, eyes the man still lying on his old robes and then snatches his armour from where she moved it when she first arrived.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he tells her when he sees what she’s gathered.

“And I’m not gonna trust you just because you say it,” she answers and then leaves him.

Stepping outside, Pym feels immediately rejuvenated, like she can breathe again. It’s the clearest, sunniest air, warm and fragrant. It’s the perfect day to take Squirrel back to their people and forget she ever even met the Weeping Monk. 

“PYM!” He’s making it very hard to forget him though, yelling from the cave as he is. She jumps at the vehemence and heads back into the cave, blind again. 

Once her sight’s recovered she can’t help but chuckle. Before her stands the frightening creature very un-frighteningly in his black shirt that looks like a jacket now, cut open in half in the front and breeches he’s holding together with his hands, also cut to pieces. 

“What on earth did you do to my clothes?!” He asks dryly and somehow that makes Pym laugh even harder.

“I’m sorry,” she yelps, trying to reign herself in and sort-of shrugs, her shoulders still bopping with subdued laughter, "couldn't be helped."

Lancelot looks miserable but it’s hysterical. No! It’s hysterical _because_ he looks miserable. And at the same time it’s unreal that she’s standing there laughing at him. After every terrible thing that he’s done, right now, he seems so… terribly normal. She could be wrong but for a moment, his face twitches, like he just might join in in the laugh but then he doesn’t, so she finally manages to calm down.

He watches as she walks to her bag and takes a needle and thread out and then holds it out for him to take. It obviously doesn’t compute at first.

“Well,” she says, shoving the stuff into his hand, “if it’s good enough to sew flesh together, it’ll hold those rags.” 

And with that, she leaves him again. Let him mend the tears himself, it’s the least he can do. She thinks she can make out a grumble as she heads back outside and the smile returns to her face, stubborn and delightful. It’s the sort of vengeance that won’t cost her soul and she indulges it.

Pym has started a fire and roasted two handfuls of mushrooms that Squirrel found by the time the monk emerges again, his clothes sewn together in what she can only describe as an attempt. He’ll need new clothes soon. But that won’t be her problem, she thinks and eyes him as he sits down next to her, eying the mushrooms in turn.

“You can have some,” she says, knowing he’ll be too proud to ask. 

But he must be hungry, since he doesn’t even try to refuse. He does however try to pace himself. After a while of chewing very deliberately, like someone who is used to making food last, he leans back and looks up at the sky.

“It’s a good time to leave,” he states. “Midday sun, leaves us enough light to catch up to your friends.”

It’s almost comical how as soon as he has uttered the words, the heavens rumble and clouds appear, as if from nowhere. All three of them look up and then Squirrel screams and then runs back to them from where he was messing with a bush. There’s a small gash on his face, bleeding. 

“Ow!” Pym yelps, understanding what hit the boy as it’s hitting her. 

It’s hail, fat and heavy, accompanied by a sudden rainfall that feels hot and preternatural. She jumps up. The monk does too, just in time to catch Squirrel leaping into his arms. The hail rains down on them like little canon bombs and they scramble to return to the cave’s mouth, seeking shelter.

On the last few paces, Pym trips, already drenched from rain. The monk, with the child on his arms, still manages to catch her by the elbow in time to keep her from face-planting on the rocky soil and he pulls her in, out of the onslaught. The sky is black now, covered in dark clouds. Pym tries to catch herself but fails and the next two things happen at once.

First, Squirrel jumps off of the monk like, well, a squirrel, and second, Pym crashes hard into the man’s chest. Her momentum makes him swerve and somehow, she ends up with her back against the cave wall and him tripping against her, steading her by the waist and himself against the rocks, effectively boxing her in as the first lighting hits a tree crown nearby, immediately followed by a roaring thunder. Pym’s heart skips a beat. And it’s the shock of the lighting and the fright of the brief free fall, not Lancelot’s eyes locking with hers, not the sudden close proximity they share as he steadies himself while looking down at her, breathless for a moment from the exertion. Really, it’s not that at all.

And soon as it happened, it’s over. He leans back out, releasing her and she clears her throat, looking at the troubled sky, trying to think of anything to say to disperse the tension she feels creeping up around her throat.

“What,” she attempts, has to cough and then tries again. “What is that?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not natural,” the monk says, frowning. “This is magic, maybe Merlin’s doing.”

He’s right but he doesn’t know it. Neither of the three know that at precisely this moment, leagues away, Merlin has raised Nimue’s broken body from the bottom of yet another lake and is calling upon all the light and dark magic he knows to bring her back to life. Neither of them has any concept of that and how would they? Such a feat has never been done before and it will weaken Merlin nearly to the point of destroying him. 

As it is, Pym, Squirrel and the Weeping Monk are confined to their cave, not knowing what is going on, staring at the sky as a giant storm unfolds, ripping through the land like a twister of destruction. 

“We should head back inside. This doesn’t look like it’s going to fade fast,” Pym says and then glances at the monk. “Gives me time to redo those stitches. Or else the clothes will fall off of you the second we head back out there.”

“Whatever you say, milady,” he says and walks further into the cave.

“Told you not to call me that,” she complains under her breath but follows him, walking after Squirrel, who keeps at the monk’s heels.

Inside, the monk wraps himself in his cloak, sitting like a bat, covered in the thing as Pym properly mends his clothes. She’s actually better at this than at healing, which is why it doesn’t take her as long. 

“Here, good as new,” she declares eventually, handing over the finished product. “Well, I mean, if you don’t count the filth and the blood on it. But that’s not my fault.”

“Thank you,” the monk says and she nods. 

She can’t bring herself to a “You’re welcome”, so that has to suffice as a response. 

“Percival,” the monk says, “would you go see how it looks out there?”

Squirrel nods dutifully and in a heartbeat, he is on his feet and running, his little footsteps echoing back into the cave.

“He worships you,” Pym says, thinking aloud and she doesn’t notice she has until the man answers.

“He’s grateful,” he says, making his way around a corner, carrying his clothes. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”

“I hope for his sake that it does,” she replies, not trying to be menacing, she’s just being honest. 

She turns around, keeping an eye on him and his armour that she placed at the far end of the cave again, hopefully out of reach. He’s not making any move towards it, just taking off his cloak and redressing. She can see glimpses of flesh, of healing wounds, of taut muscle rolling under pale skin. She looks away.

“Rest assured, no one has ever loved me long. Or at all,” his voice rumbles from behind her and just like that Pym is speechless again. And then she’s angry.

“Are you trying to make me feel bad for you?”

“No,” he almost chuckles. “If I’ve learned one thing in my life it’s to choose the battles I can win.”

“Your wounds tell another story,” Pym deadpans.

“Ah, yes.” The monk nods, returning now dressed. He looks down at her where she sits on the floor, leaning against the stone. “But I wasn’t meant to survive that last one, as you know.”

“I’m not having this discussion again,” Pym groans. “If you wanna die so bad, go out into that storm and get hit by lightning for all I care. But the boy would probably follow you. Obsessed with you as he is.”

“I don’t wish for him to be,” the man replies, sounding sincere and looking genuinely regretful. “I just wanted to keep him safe.”

Pym is loathe to thank him, even for this, so she keeps her mouth shut and listens as small feet run back to them.

“Storm’s still raging,” Squirrel says, a little wet and a little out of breath. “And the sun’s going down.”

Pym sighs. “So I guess that’s another night in here in the damp cold.” And as if on cue, she has to sneeze. 

“I’ll build a fire,” Squirrel shrugs at the same time that Pym is hit with a heap of dark fabric. 

She reacts, instinctively removing the offending thing from her, feeling the rough material under her fingers and only realises when the monk lies down opposite of her, that he has thrown his cloak her way. To keep her warm.

“This stinks,” she says, looking him dead in the eye. She doesn’t want his charity.

“So give it back,” he challenges. 

Pym holds onto it. She _does_ want a coverlet. 

Begrudgingly, she wraps it around herself and stares at the dusty floor.

“Thank you,” she mumbles, half-hoping he won’t hear.

“You’re welcome,” he says, which is her cue to lie down and turn away from both the males and will herself to sleep.

As far as small mercys go, she falls quickly enough from sheer exhaustion because she hasn’t slept more than two hours the previous night. Her last thought before she drops off is that the cloak actually doesn’t smell half as bad as it really, _really_ should.

She dreams of a storm on the water and between crushing waves, catches glimpses of clear blue, looking back at her. She knows what it is and it unsettles her so deeply that she pretends not to remember at all in the morning.


	4. the inn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll just give you this: Oh no, there is only one bed!
> 
> (Note: This is unedited, I will fix grammar and spelling mistakes as I find them on re-reading but I wanted this chapter out of my drafts and out in the world, I hope you can forgive any errors!)

Pym is roused softly by a small hand, lightly shaking her by the shoulder and opens her eyes to Squirrel, already more awake than any being has any right to at what she presumes must be an ungodly hour. She blinks awake and sits up, mindful to know where the monk is and to not look at him or his blue eyes under any circumstances. She keeps her own downcast almost all through the meek breakfast Squirrel has hunted for in the woods.

Some berries and browned mushrooms in her belly make it easier to finally get up on her own two feet and she manages to mostly ignore the monk’s existence until they leave the cave, greeted by another beautiful sunny day, the storm nothing but a distant memory. Squirrel looks to her once they’ve arrived back on the small path they had crossed getting to the cave two days prior.  
“We need to get back to the river,” she says. “And then move downstream, we should find the others then.”  
“Good, let’s go then,” says the monk and then she feels his gaze on her. “Can I have my armour back?”  
Pym holds on to his gear tighter, she knows exactly why she’s held on to it until now.

  
“No,” she says. “You’re not getting this until we’re back with our people, safe and sound.”  
“God, woman!” The monk sighs, exasperated (if one can believe that particular brand of gall). “If I’d wanted you dead, I could have killed you a thousand times already.”  
“Well, forgive me for not placing my faith in you, grimey, old fae slayer.”

  
“Colourful,” he notes, deadpan and obviously unimpressed with her improvised monicker for him. “But fine, suit yourself. The sword will get heavy before long. I don’t mind you carrying it for me actually.”  
“I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not gonna work,” she pouts, looking over the vista in front of them, trying to get a sense of direction. “You’re not gonna bait me into giving you your weapons back.”  
“Like I said, suit yourself,” he repeats and then starts walking ahead, Squirrel eager to keep in step with him.

They walk for a while until they finally reach the water with Pym trailing behind the whole way. She wears the Weeping Monk’s armour as if it were her own and to her deep displeasure it really is heavy and constricting and uncomfortable and she couldn’t walk faster if she tried—but she will be damned if she shows any sign of fatigue now. So she masks her strain under the added weight as defiant distancing and watches the others tread through the forest, following the river a good few paces ahead of her.

Squirrel talks and talks non-stop but instead of telling him to shut up, like Pym has half a mind to, Lancelot humours him, if tight-lipped and curt. He still indulges the boy and it’s weirdly endearing, so she eventually keeps focusing more on her feet as they walk, careful not to let her guard slip any more than it already has. She’s almost managed to dream herself to a completely different world (maybe to somewhere where Dof is still around) when the monk stops walking in front of her out of absolutely nowhere and she almost crashes into him from behind, barely catching herself in time.

“What?” She asks indignantly just as he turns around to face her. It’s the first time that day their eyes meet and Pym has to do her darndest not to flinch. Did they have to be this blue?!  
“They left the river behind here,” the monk states, certain as death.  
“But they wouldn’t,” Pym says, shaking her head. “Not unless they found…”  
“The girl,” Lancelot finishes and then draws in a deep breath through his nose, almost like he’s sniffing.

And then she remembers. This is what he does. He hunts fae by smell, it’s all he’d ever done. Pym looks away from him, disgusted. If she didn’t know better, she’d believe he reacts to it, shrinking into himself a bit as if in shame—but she’s not seeing him right, straining to study a group of daisies growing from the dirt by her feet, so she’s probably wrong. Either way it doesn’t matter. One, she will soon be rid of him. Two, disgusting as the things he’d used his gift to do before, now they need it and so she keeps following as he leads them away from the riverbed, back into the woods, tracking Merlin’s search party like a priced hound.

"Can you... _smell_ her?" She asks after they walked for a bit, him seeming more sure-footed than before, gaining his strength back.

"Maybe," he surrenders. "It's faint and could just be someone who was close to her. Maybe the human she was with. Or family."

"Merlin," Pym thinks aloud and then is instantly afraid she said too much.

"Ah," the monk hums. "Well, if she's his daughter her powers make a lot more sense. I was wondering about that."

"Well, yeah," Pym says, trying to come up with something cutting to end that conversation quickly. "If she's really alive, she'll kick all of your Paladin behinds."

"I no longer count myself among them," Lancelot offers up easily. "So as far as I'm concerned, she could just as well. It doesn't matter to me."

Something about the way he says it makes Pym doubt him but it doesn't feel like he particularily clings to his brethren, more that... he's unsure where to count himself now and she figures it really is nowhere. He's a lost fae, alone in the world. And maybe she should relish in it, but really she just thinks it's rather sad. She keeps trying to distract herself from all her misgivings about the monk and the weird tug in her chest (watching him keep Squirrel from tripping over roots every now and then) alike, by wondering about what happened to Merlin. If the monk was right the day before and the storm had indeed been magical, then maybe they really had found Nimue and maybe Merlin had conjured up something to help her or revive her.

Maybe her best friend is safe and alive, at this very moment, surrounded by their people. That thought makes her feel momentarily better, so she clings to it. They find a road, so walking is easier. It gives her mind some peace to drift and imagine what she’ll say to her friend once they’re reunited. _Thank you for your sacrifice_ , comes to mind. _One day, I hope to be as brave as you. I’m so proud of you, even though we’ve lost so much._

Gods, she really can’t wait to see her. Nimue’s going to be so glad to see her too.

Imagining their reunion in great detail, Pym is almost in high spirits when the monk stops their procession a second time. He stretches out his one hand to stop her walking while snatching Squirrel back by his collar with the other, tucking the boy close to his side. He turns around to Pym and nods to his armour wrapped around her body.  
“I’m going to need this back right now,” he says calmly.  
“Why?” Pym asks, decidedly not calm.

“Paladins,” he says, almost nonchalantly. “Three, maybe four, too close to outrun. You need to hide. And hand me my sword.”  
“You’re lying,” Pym says, trying to convince herself more than anything.  
“No he’s not,” Squirrel says, certain. “He doesn’t lie, give him his sword. And I’ll take the dagger!”

  
“No, you’ll go hide with Pym,” Lancelot insists, crouching down to be level with the kid. “I need you to not be a hero right now, Percival, can you do that?”  
Squirrel pouts, so the monk repeats himself more emphatically: “Can you do that?”  
“Yeah,” Squirrel pouts and the monk rises, holding out his hand out to Pym, demanding his weapon just as faint, distant voices suddenly appear to get louder and louder, accompanied by huffs clicking. They’re on horses, so they’ll be here in minutes.

Pym has never handed a sword over faster.  
“Thank you,” the monk says and then points at a rock a few feet into the tree line. “Hide there, don’t come out until I tell you to.”  
Pym reacts more on instinct than anything else and drags Squirrel with her, physically restraining him, keeping him from running back to Lancelot as they hide behind the rock, listening as the paladines arrive and some words are spoken that she can’t make out.

And then everything turns into a cacophony of steel hitting steel and angry cries and then gasps of pain, neighing horses and strangled gurgles and then huffs again, quickly galloping away. Then someone screams, a man. The monk. Lancelot. And Pym is so startled that she lets go of Squirrel and just as quickly, the boy has reacted, sprung up and free and ran back to the road. She charges after him and stops as soon as she sees the carnage.

There are two horses left and four corpses on the ground, none of them are the monk. Lancelot stands in the midst of the bodies, looking off, looking angry.  
“What is it?” Squirrel asks, reaching him sooner.  
“One of them got away,” he says. “He’ll spread the word quickly enough. They’ll come after me now.”  
“Fuck,” it escapes Pym unbidden and the monk’s head snaps around to her as if she had shot him with an arrow. “So what do we do now? Go back to the cave?”  
“That’s too far, we’ll never reach it,” the monk says. “But we can’t stay out here, we need to hide out somewhere for a couple of days, let the trail run cold before we can get back out there.”  
“But we won’t find the others anymore either,” Pym realises.

The path forward is pretty clear. They need to ditch the monk and make their way by themselves. Merlin has a mere days head start, they can’t be too far off. Let the monk fend for himself and meet his own fate as it shall unfold. It’s the most sensible solution, it’s the only thing they can do that makes sense. Pym can see that Squirrel has not understood that yet—but the monk has. He’s going to say it too, she understands and something, some unfathomable, stupid thing inside her, compels her to stop him. Why exactly she will never fully grasp.

“Well it is what it is,” she states, her voice firm and decided. “We’ll find somewhere and lay low. But we gotta keep moving. Word will travel about Merlin, I’m sure and if all else fails, I’ll find a bird to send for information to… somewhere. I’ll figure it out. First we have to get off the road.“

Lancelot stares at her blankly, as if for a moment his world had come off its hinges, as if she had three heads, as if that was the most unthinkable thing that had ever happened. But he eventually snaps out of it and nods, then grabs Squirrel by the shoulder and turns him around, giving him a light shove towards one of the horses to help him up there and then gives Pym a hand to do the same. He takes the other horse for himself. They ride until the sun sets, only stopping once to do their business and find some leafs to chew on.

It’s nearly nightfall when they reach the outskirts of a sleepy, tiny village with a small main street with some stores and what looks like a tavern with an inn attached. They leave the horses near a small stream of water and inch closer to the little town, careful to stay in the shadows with their hoods in their faces.

Behind a particularly noisy chicken shed, Pym grabs the monk by the arm to hiss at him.  
“The inn?” She asks.  
“Best we can do, I think,” he nods.  
“But you can’t go in like that,” she says, gesturing at the marks on his face. “That’s a dead giveaway.”  
“So what do you suggest I do about it?!” Lancelot snaps, almost prissy, almost like it’s a sore subject and Pym figures that makes sense.

Ten minutes later, Pym kneels over one of her wooden bowls, mixing together wax from a candle Squirrel had gone to steal from a lamp on a porch, some aloe from her tinctures and dirt from the ground, adding pale sand until she’s happy with the colour. Once she’s done, she nods at the monk to get on her level. He looks deeply unhappy and doesn’t move.  
“Come on,” she urges. “It’s so dark, no one will be able to tell.”  
“You want to put dirt on my face,” he states, like he hasn’t had much worse on there before.  
“I’m trying to help you, don’t be a baby,” she huffs, rolling her eyes.  
The monk doesn’t like it, but he sinks down onto his knees like a martyr, resigning himself to her plan as Squirrel keeps taking his role as lookout very seriously.

Lancelot turns his face to her but won’t help her a bit by taking off his hood, Pym has to do that, accidentally touching his cakey, soft blonde hair in the process. He really needs a bath, she thinks. And something unbidden sparks in her chest at the thought. She pushes it away, clears her throat harshly, and focuses on the lines on his face. She takes her little beige wax and dirt mixture and coats two fingers in it, then brings them up to his cheeks and starts covering up his ashfolk markings as well as she can in the dimming light.

He stares into the middle distance, enduring it as if she was flogging him. Eventually, he even closes his eyes as she covers his skin and he almost looks like he gags, like he can’t breathe for a second and Gods, what a dramatic little bitch.

Finally, Pym thinks it won’t get any better than what it is and she can’t add any more paste either or it will start to cake and fall off his face again.  
“There,” she declares accordingly. “It’s done, you can stop flinching now.”  
It takes a whole twenty seconds for him to open his eyes again. He looks like a stone, his jaw clenched shut and his eyes looking at a point slightly to the left of her face—but Pym was right, in this light, he looks like any regular manblood. Human. Handsome, though that’s a word she quickly banishes and kicks back into action.

“So,” she rasps, clamouring back onto her feet, feeling suddenly too close to him. “The inn, then?”  
“Yes,” the monk says and rises, too.  
“Good thinking relieving the paladins of their gold before we left them,” Pym says, for once honestly appreciative of the man and watches him produce a small sack of coins from his belt. “That will pay for at least two nights.”

And so they walk, the three of them, down the main street of the village. Squirrel is unusually quiet and slow and Pym figures he must be tired, which is hardly a surprise after the day they’ve had. To her surprise, Lancelot must understand the same thing because he gives the boy a little tug and then opens his arms, offering to carry him and to Pym’s even bigger surprise the wild and independent boy takes him up on it, lets the man take him from the dusty ground and lift him, place him on his hip and carry him like a babe.

Squirrels head drops and Pym thinks that by the time they reach the inn, the boy might actually already be asleep.  
“This is so weird,” she whispers to herself as they come up on the entrance.  
“What?” The monk asks.  
“Nothing,” she says and pushes the door to the tavern open.

Inside, the busy jabbering and commotion stops in an instant as the new arrivals pop in, they are given a once over by the crowd. Pym wonders how they must look to them, weary travelers, a man and a woman with a sleeping child, their shoes caked with mud, the monks clothes torn and mended.  
“Show them the money,” she growls under her breath, afraid they’ll be chased off because they look like beggars.  
Lancelot understands and touches his free hand to the sack now secured again around his belt.

And as if on cue, a comely, red-headed woman approaches them, her cheeks red with wine.  
“Looking for board?” She asks, revealing a few missing teeth in her friendly smile.  
“Just for a day or two,” Pym says, quick on her feet. “We barely escaped with our life from the fighting in Gramaire, we’re looking to make our way to the sea and book passage on a ship away from here.”  
“And who could blame you, child,” the woman nods. “You have to keep that boy of yours safe.”  
“Uh, yeah,” Pym mumbles, understanding what else they must look like, other than beggars. A family. Good grief. But a good cover is a good cover. “So, uh, could we… get a room?”

“Of course,” the innkeep replies, smiling but then adds: “Unfortunately we only have one room left with only the one bed but you’ll make do, won’t you? The boy is still small, isn’t he?”

“Er, yeah,” Pym nods and then looks at the monk holding the child and once again, he looks like he has turned to stone and like his jaw is so tight it could snap any second.  
Looking to him for support in her bullshit story is completely useless. But then again, he can’t ruin it if he says nothing. He just follows as the tavern crowd goes back to being their unruly selves and the innkeep leads them up the stairs into the second story and down the end of a corridor, where the noise of the place is nearly faded to nothing but soft rumblings.

The room they are shown is sparse, ice cold and small but it has a bed that three people can fit on and even a clean chamber pot in the corner and a small fireplace that hopefully still works.  
“It’s not much but it’s a roof over your head,” the woman says, already on her way out.  
“It’s perfect, thank you,” Pym says and Lancelot gets a couple of coins from the satchel, otherwise completely mum, and holds it out to the innkeep.  
The woman counts the coins and nods. “That will do for two nights. With breakfast. I’ll bring it up to your room in the morning. You had to sell your wedding bands for those coins did you not, my dears?”

She looks pointedly at the distinct lack of jewelry on both the according fingers on Pym and the monk and Pym knows what is expected of her.  
“No, yes, we did,” she hurries to cover. “We left with barely anything else. It pained us both… gravely to part with that… uh… symbol of our holy matri-, um, union but yeah… things… are. Yes. Hard. Hard, hard times. Out there.”  
“Well, now you’re here with Madame Cealia and I’ll take good care of you,” the round woman assures them and then retreats. “We’re out of firewood for tonight but there is another blanket underneath the bed if it gets too cold. You rest well now.”

The door closes, leaving the three of them in the relative quiet of the room, which is why Pym can distinctly hear that the monk breathes out harshly as soon as they’re alone, almost as if he’d held it in the whole time.  
“Well you were supremely helpful,” Pym notes sarcastically. “Thanks for that.”

He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he softly puts Squirrel down onto the edge of the bed. The boy is fast asleep.  
“I’ll, um,” he starts, then stops because his voice is raspy, making him have to clear his throat uneasily. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”  
“Nonsense,” Pym says, entirely out of reflexive courtesy. “The bed is big enough. Plus it’s ice cold in here and without a fire, we’d do well to stay close.”  
He gives her a long look.  
“It’s fine,” she says, not fully knowing why. “It really is, don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“Thank you,” the monk says, in that weird, grateful way that makes Pym feel all funny, like he’s never actually had anybody do anything remotely nice or gracious for him in his whole life. It makes her uncomfortable. Mostly because she pities him—but also because it makes her want to hold him and make it better. Stupid compassion. Darn empathy. She doesn’t want it. Not for him.  
“Don’t,” she repeats and goes to lie down on the bed because she can’t think of anything else to do.

She covers herself and Squirrel with the blanket she works up from under the kid when the monk gets the second one from underneath the bed and gingerly climbs in beside her. He’s most careful not to touch her and she is as well, still he puts the blanket over her too. It’s oddly sweet and caring and that mere fact entirely does not compute for Pym. But still, for a sweet five minutes, she thinks she’s going to fall asleep quickly. Then the cold creeps into her bones.

She is determined not to show it, though. She simply pulls the blanket closer and tries to curl up as much as possible. She brushes Lancelot’s side in the process and scurries closer to Squirrel whose sleep is as deep as ever. It’s miserably cold but she’ll be fine. She will be. And maybe it helps a little bit that the monk lies beside her on the small bed, maybe she doesn’t hate it that he radiates heat.

She doesn’t want to touch him but she’s not going to complain about him being there, she decides and relaxes, if only marginally. And not for long. Because she has counted about half of a thousand sheep when the monk makes a sound behind her.

It’s a whine, something small and afraid and he does it two more times until curiosity gets the better of her and she turns around. The man is sleeping but his eyes are frantically flicking from side to side behind closed lids. It’s a nightmare, she realises. And it must be a bad one. Even in his rest, he looks anguished and terrified and much younger than his years. Vulnerable. Harmless. Lost.

It’s that cursed compassion that makes her scooch closer to him, not really with a set goal in mind, just because she feels compelled to be supportive of a creature so obviously in distress. She hovers then a few breaths away from his body, touching her shoulder to his as she settles back in onto her back. His reaction is like a snap.

Faster than she can react and so sudden it makes her let out a little squeak, he’s got her in a clutch. In sleep, he wraps his arm around her and puts his head on her shoulder and there she lies, half buried beneath him and she thinks this is what she gets for wanting to help. Only it’s not half as uncomfortable as she should think it is. The truth is: he’s warm. And the truth is also, he’s soft. Even if his clothes smell of old leather, the scent of his skin is of a certain sweetness, some concerningly pleasing notes that make her want to take a deep breath in. She fights the urge but not the touch.

Even more, she shifts a little so he can hold onto her better, feeling his breathing calm down. He’s still sleeping, there’s no doubt but he’s quieting, slowing, his grip on her stops being desperate and starts feeling reassuring. It’s a weird sensation. Supremely, entirely weird. What is even more weird, is how Pym falls asleep there just a few moments later.

She wakes up to find their positions shifted in the very early hours of the morning. Where before Lancelot had been lying beside her, she is now draped over his chest, her hair spilling over his collarbone, her lips that close to his skin there. Somehow, they had moved together in the night so that he was now holding her, his hand flat on her back.

Upon fully understanding this, Pym freezes. The daze of her own dream, the fog of the night, fades from her brain and she doesn’t know what she had been thinking getting so close. Allowing herself to have any part in his comfort, even if it was a decision she had made selflessly. Now it feels strange, maybe even wrong. Gladly, the monk is still unconscious, which means she can wiggle out from under his grip. And she will. Soon.

It’s just that it’s warm. And… Gods, there’s a shameful part of her that feels content just being held. To have limbs boxing her in, keeping the outside world truly _outside_ of the circle of those arms. She allows herself a brief indulgence, feels a steady heartbeat reverberate in the man’s chest, feels the seam of his leather shirt and then his warm skin on the side of her face. He does smell quite nice there, almost in the crook of his neck.

 _OKAYYY,_ she thinks at herself sharply. _OUT. OFF. AWAY!_

Cautiously, she breaks free from him, careful not to move too much and disturb him, or worse: wake him up. She’s good on that front, though. Even when she half plops back on her back, the monk doesn’t stir, only his arms fall back limply on his torso now that they’re empty of her. But Pym hadn’t accounted for the other person in the room.

Squirrel blinks at her tiredly when she turns on her side to face him, falsely expecting him to also be asleep still. He tilts his little head on the mattress.  
“What are you doing?“ He whispers.  
“Nothing,” Pym replies quickly. “I don’t know.”  
He looks about as sceptical as a child can can seconds after waking up but to her relief, he decides to forgo interrogating her in favour of turning over and going back to sleep.

When the morning fully arrives some one, two hours later, Squirrel seems to have forgotten all about it. Only Lancelot catches her eye as they get out of the bed like something is up. Like something has shifted. Like he remembers. It scares her, the way he looks at her.

It scares her even more that a part of her wants to do all of it again come nightfall. It may be that she is losing her mind? Surely that’s what it must be. Anything else is unthinkable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you by the way for your comments, they are my fuel and interaction always makes me write faster/more/finish fic :)  
> I am truly grateful for every single one <3

**Author's Note:**

> I am always happy about comments and reviews, can't wait to hear your thoughts!


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